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Mike Sherriff, with friend Kajol Chatterjee, at Shahbag,
Dhaka. Source: Mike Sherriff
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One of our aims is to mobilise our members to influence change.
And at a time of rapid change, much of it not very positive for our
members and the people who rely on their services, we should be using all the
means we can to try to influence what is happening.
We agreed to start a blog and a few days later I got on a
plane to Dhaka, Bangladesh. And in the centre of Dhaka a whole new social
movement was developing, created using face book and blogs (the Shahbag movement).
This certainly demonstrated to me the power of social media
to mobilise a huge crowd of people to protest.
But blogging can also be risky and a few days later one of
the bloggers, Ahmed Rajib Haidar, was hacked to death, allegedly by student
religious fanatics. More recently several bloggers have been arrested.
Our blogs are unlikely to be so powerful or to carry such
risk for the bloggers. But they should be a space for conversation and dialogue
about what is happening locally and give a voice to views that are not
necessarily prominent in other local media. I hope that they can also be a tool
that will mobilise our members to demand a fairer Islington.
Mike Sherriff (Chief Executive)
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